The Russo Brothers Say Third ‘Captain America’ Movie Was Originally Quite Different from ‘Civil War’

In the aftermath of the latest trailer for Captain America: Civil War, it’s been hard to talk about anything but Spider-Man, because, you know, it’s freaking Spider-Man. But despite what all your friends have been saying, there’s quite a lot more going on with this movie, and the Russo Brothers touched on several of those things (and Spider-Man) in a recent interview with Forbes Magazine.

Image via Marvel

You can check out Matt’s rundown of what they said about Spidey right here, but they had plenty more to say about what they originally had planned for the third Captain America film, how Avengers: Infinity War will expand the scope of the MCU, and their involvement with Ghostbusters.

On how they ended up expanding Captain America 3 into Civil War:

But if you have a really cool idea and you need another $20 million to make it happen have you a situation where you had to go back to the studio and ask for more money to make it possible?

JR: That happened on this movie, actually. We can’t talk about it because it’d be a spoiler but we made our argument, a sound a logical argument for why we thought it’d help and enhance the film which will ultimately enhance the box office because the better the movie is, the better the movie will do.

AR: What we can talk about though is that when we were going to do Captain America 3 it was not necessarily going to be Captain America: Civil War. The idea that we wanted to do Civil War and that Robert Downey Jr. needed to be involved, because he wasn’t going to be part of Captain America 3, that changed the financial equation in exactly the way you’re talking about – perhaps even more so.

So Captain America: Civil War could have been a very different movie?

AR: Totally.

Image via Marvel

It’s hard to swallow Russo’s conception that “the better the movie is, the better the movie will do,” as time has proven that is exactly not true in almost every way possible. Are we all here thinking that Avatar and Star Wars: The Force Awakens are the very best movies? Good movies, sure, but the best? Regardless, it’d be interesting to hear what the original idea for the film was before Civil War became the big idea. And speaking of big storylines, here’s what the directors had to say about new characters entering into the MCU in Avengers: Infinity War:

JR: New characters that are going to appear in Avengers: Infinity War. It’s a big sprawling ambitious movie, it’s about as ambitious as movies get and it should be, and the title alone indicates that there will be an incredible scape and scope to it.

AR: It is intended to be the entire culmination of the Marvel cinematic universe and, in many ways, the end to that part of it. But we don’t even have the first draft in on that script yet; we’re still in the outline phase. It’s hard not to talk about it too specifically now only because of spoilers but also because we’re still figuring it out.

Image via Marvel

This shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise. Even if the two previous Avengers films weren’t filled to bursting with new characters and allusions to others, the very title of Infinity War seems inevitable to boast as many superheroes and humans that help superheroes as you can imagine. It would be awesome to see the likes of Daredevil, The Punisher, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage cross over from Netflix to make an appearance, but that might come with a legal headache that would make any decent lawyer want to go all Scanners. We shall see, but Infinity War is definitely going to be a big freakin’ movie, so much so that it’s cleared the Russo Bros. schedule and made them take a walk away from other opportunities, like Ghostbusters. Here’s what they had to say about that:

You have been linked to a Ghostbusters movie. What is the status with that?

JR: There is no status with that for us. There was a period there when Paul Feig was engaging Sony in talks about Ghostbusters and we were also engaging them. He was further along with his process than we were and he closed his deal so that’s the only Ghostbusters world that’s being explored right now over at Sony. Once we took Infinity War it too us off the table for any kind of any potential work on a Ghostbusters project.

So, there you have it. The Russos have definitely set-up a major task for themselves with both Civil War and Infinity War, enough that they’re sacrificing a huge part of their creative career to take the projects on. If they pull off anything resembling a coherent, successful movie with each parts, they will essentially be able to write their own ticket going forward. If not, the message boards and comment sections will not be merciful. On second thought, they probably won’t be either way.

COLLIDER participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means COLLIDER gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.